Latest Pleistocene Stories

A 50,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton discovered in a cave in southwestern France was intentionally buried, a finding that confirms burials took place in Western Europe prior to the arrival of modern humans.

Geneticists led by Matthias Meyer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany extracted a nearly 400,000-year-old human thigh-bone fossil from the bottom of a cave shaft in northern Spain called Sima de los Huesos, where remains of 28 early humans of an unknown species have been discovered.

The search for a common ancestor that links both modern humans to the ancient Neanderthals that roamed Europe thousands of years ago is far from over, according to a new study from an international team of experts. Dental analysis has so far shown no common match between the two hominins.

An analysis of a 1.8 million-year-old human skull suggests that the earliest members of our Homo genus actually belonged to a single species, a finding that contradicts previous beliefs that there were several different human species walking the Earth during that time.

Traces of large ice sheets from the Pleistocene on a seamount off the north-eastern coast of Russia have been discovered by a team of geologists and geophysicists from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.

About 10,000 years ago, the Neolithic age ushered in one of the most dramatic periods of human cultural and technological transition, where independently, different world populations developed the domestication of plants and animals.

Australopithecus garhi is a gracile australopithecine species whose fossils were discovered in 1996 by a research team led by Ethiopian paleontologist Berhane Asfaw ad Tim White, an American paleontologist. The remains are believed to be a human ancestor species and most likely the direct ancestor to the human genus Homo.
Tim White was the scientist to find the first of the key A. garhi fossils in 1996 within the Bouri Formation found in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression....

The Neanderthals or Neandertals are an extinct species or subspecies of the genus Homo which is closely related to modern humans. They are known from fossils, dating back from the Pleistocene period, which have been found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia. The species gets its name from Neandertal, “Neander’s Valley”, the location in Germany where it was first uncovered.
Neanderthals are classified either as a subspecies of Homo sapiens or as a distinct species of the...

Homo sapiens is the scientific name for the human species. Homo is the human genus, which also includes Neanderthals and various other extinct species of hominid. H. sapiens is the only surviving species of the genus Homo. Modern humans are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, distinguished from their direct ancestor, Homo sapiens idaltu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens_idaltu).
Subspecies of H. sapiens include Homo sapiens idaltu, roughly translated as “elder wise human” and...

Homo sapiens idaltu is an extinct subspecies of Homo sapiens that lived nearly 160,000 years ago during the Pleistocene in Africa. “Idaltu” comes from the Saho-Afar word meaning “elder” or “first born”.
The fossilized remains of H. s. idaltu were uncovered at Herto Bouri near the Middle Awash site of Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle in the year 1997 by Tim White, but were first revealed in 2003. Herto Bouri is a portion of Ethiopia under volcanic layers. By using radioisotope dating,...

Homo floresiensis
Homo floresiensis, or Flores Man, nicknamed “hobbit” and “Flow”, is an extinct species in the genus Homo. The remains of an individual that would have stood about 3 feet in height were uncovered in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Incomplete skeletons of nine individuals have been recovered, including one complete cranium. These remains have been the focus of intense research to establish whether they represent a species distinctive from modern humans....